The Wedding at Cana

Today’s Gospel never disappoints, for to this bumbling layman it is crammed with suggestive detail. The Wedding at Cana appears only in John, and immediately follows the Calling of the Disciples, and immediately precedes the Cleansing of the Temple, both of which appear in some form or another in all four. This alone ought to focus the mind upon a degree of narrative intensity arising from the position of this miracle story in John (2:1–12)—quite apart from its several other sources of interest:

On the third day there was a marriage at Cana in Galilee, and the mother of Jesus was there; 2 Jesus also was invited to the marriage, with his disciples. 3 When the wine gave out, the mother of Jesus said to him, “They have no wine.” 4 And Jesus said to her, “O woman, what have you to do with me? My hour has not yet come.” 5 His mother said to the servants, “Do whatever he tells you.” 6 Now six stone jars were standing there, for the Jewish rites of purification, each holding twenty or thirty gallons. 7 Jesus said to them, “Fill the jars with water.” And they filled them up to the brim. 8 He said to them, “Now draw some out, and take it to the steward of the feast.” So they took it. 9 When the steward of the feast tasted the water now become wine, and did not know where it came from (though the servants who had drawn the water knew), the steward of the feast called the bridegroom 10 and said to him, “Every man serves the good wine first; and when men have drunk freely, then the poor wine; but you have kept the good wine until now.” 11 This, the first of his signs, Jesus did at Cana in Galilee, and manifested his glory; and his disciples believed in him. 12 After this he went down to Capernaum, with his mother and his brothers and his disciples; and there they stayed for a few days.

Cana of Galilee was the place where the nobleman of Capernaum secured the healing of his son (Jn 4:46), and apparently also the birth-place of the disciple Nathanael (Jn 21:2). Only these and the wedding are mentioned in scripture, and none of the three outside John. The site in Galilee is almost impossible to identify, apart from the fact that Jesus “went down” from there to Capernaum (12), and the nobleman besought him to “go down” also. Josephus mentions Cana, a village of Galilee (Vita, 16), and simply adds that it was “in the plain of Asochis,” which does not carry us much farther. However, Kana el-Jelil is the exact modern Arabic equivalent of Cana of Galilee, and that name has long been applied to a considerable ruin on the slope north of el-Battauf, the ancient Asochis. This was, in turn, on ground above Capernaum, which could be reached by road north of the Toran range, towards the valley of the Jordan, without any need to swing south. Many rock-hewn tombs and several water cisterns were found there in the nineteenth century, but no spring. This is probably as close as we are ever likely to get to the real Cana of Galilee, and all primitive attempts correctly to identify the place were either wrong or wildly wrong, beginning with Eusebius.  

The largest context for the story would appear to be the development of basic symbolism about Jesus, and an allusion to the coming of his “hour,” and what that might or might not mean. This trickles all the way down to the temporal marker at the beginning, viz. “the third day.” Yet the story also functions as an elementary, almost defining demonstration of his power, in fact the first such sign; its unequivocally divine source, and its independence of human agency.

The passage, as Raymond Brown observes, is mostly free of uniquely Johannine language; indeed the snow of detail (all of which squares with Greek witnesses and the Vulgate) runs more closely parallel with synoptic narrative style. It parses as follows: This is a marriage feast at a particular place, on a particular day (1). The mother of Jesus, Jesus himself, and his disciples are all there (2). The need for the miracle is made clear; the wine has run out. The mother of Jesus notices this, and remarks upon it (3). The highly ambiguous exchange then takes place between mother and son, Mary’s first and last appearance in John before she reappears at the foot of the cross (4). Resistance on Jesus’ part is strongly implied; and corresponding persistence on Mary’s (5). The miracle is then set up; the number and capacity of the empty vessels carefully itemized (and therefore their size and shape; the ancients were well accustomed to reaching these conclusions by mental arithmetic on the basis of very limited information), as well as their ritual use (6), which is a rather important point because it sets up a link with O.T. wine and abundance imagery in relation to the messianic wedding feast, e.g. Isaiah 54:4–8 and 62:4–5. Jesus gives instructions about water, and these are followed without question (7); Jesus gives further instructions about drawing some of it out and taking it to the steward; these are likewise followed (8). The exact character of the water-into-wine transformation miracle is revealed almost in passing; but crucially it is not made public. The steward of the feast does not know where the good wine came from; the servants, however, do know, and the authors of John are explicit in their determination to let us know that they know the servants knew (9). Some confusion in the mind of the steward arises from the sudden arrival of fresh wine at this point in the wedding feast, which reinforces the private, even clandestine nature of the miracle (10), but the exact location and divine significance of the sign are immediately emphasized for the second time, together with the fact that the disciples also know what has happened and how, and that they believe (11). The story ends with further specifics about where Jesus went afterwards, with whom, and for approximately how long (12). Twice Mary is quite emphatically not named, though her identity is nevertheless made perfectly clear. Jesus’ manner of address to her (4) is at the very least surprising—“Quid mihi et tibi, mulier?” “O woman, what have you to do with me?” (note the sparkling clarity of the Latin, and the clunkiness of the RSV English, although I suppose it’s marginally less bad than King James (absorbed without change from Tyndale): “[O] Woman, what have I to do with thee?”—though this would seem to prompt by way of good old Hellenistic (and Johannine) antithesis profound reflections upon the available answers to that quite extraordinary question. Meanwhile, the old preamble in the Book of Common Prayer underlines the sacramental significance of Jesus’ action specifically in relation to matrimony “which holy estate Christ adorned and beautified with his presence, and first miracle that he wrought, in Cana of Galilee.”

Finally, it is amusing to note the coyness with which all English translators since 1526 have navigated the rather sticky point of verse 10, when the steward remarks to the poor bridegroom—I suppose high-handed wedding-planners are by no means an exclusively modern phenomenon—“Every man serves the good wine first; and when men have drunk freely, then the poor wine; but you have kept the good wine until now.” When men have drunk freely is, in other words, a plucky attempt to draw a veil over what the Vulgate renders with total explicitness as cum inebriati fuerint, in other words “when men are drunk.” No two ways about it, ancient or at least Hellenistic social drinking was about getting thoroughly, totally, and acceptably drunk, and the only reason you kept the bad wine until last was that by that time nobody would or could tell the difference. In this sense, you could even argue that there is actually no need for the miracle, other than to generate a supply of poor wine. That Jesus produced a quality vintage went beyond the immediate requirements of the situation and into the realm of extravagance. It seems possible that further, now completely forgotten, inferences on the part of the steward are: “Go ahead and serve even more good wine to your drunk guests, but don’t blame me for the consequences,” or, possibly, “If I were you, at this point I’d keep the good stuff; don’t for Heaven’s sake waste it on the guests. They’re already drunk,” in which cases there is, here, some congruence with the flamboyant Mary-versus-Martha value system we encounter at 12:1–8. In the Johannine context I do wonder if verse 10 may stem, probably unwittingly, from more than a little contact with the applied practices of first-century Greek or even Roman sommeliers, but that is another matter entirely. 

A further and unanswerable question is, who were the bride and groom, and what was their link to the holy family? In the light of subsequent events did they and/or the servants eventually form part of the earliest Christian communities, perhaps knowing or ultimately comprehending what part that wedding feast played as a prologue to Jesus’ public ministry? Did they exist at all? Does this really matter? Not such trivial considerations, these, but such is the pleasure of exercising your imagination over impossibly ancient texts derived from even more obscure sources that frequently reveal more to us than ever their transmitters can possibly have hoped.

The Frog

This morning I came across one of my old Latin exercises from years ago. In it, Reginaldus asks “what does the following sentence have to mean: ‘AEQVAS RARA INTER COAXAT RANA AQVAS’?” The answer: The rare frog croaks among level waters. These days I’d probably make an adjustment in the interests of English prose style and, notwithstanding the unequivocal meaning of aequas aquas, and Reginaldus’s larger point, which is that there can only be one meaning in this case—level waters, plural—opt instead for The rare frog croaks amid still water. The beauty of this simple Latin sentence is that the (to us) out-of-sequence word order actually reinforces its poetic meaning by beginning with a sort of floating adjective, level, that must wait until the very end before it joins up with its noun, in this case waters. Thus level... waters enclose the verb and its subject, the two parts of which, rara... rana, in turn orbit coaxat like planets around the sun. It is as if the arrangement of the words themselves reflect that lonely frog’s croak radiating over a calm pond. Just brilliant.

In English we are stuck with the relatively primitive, overriding stricture of word order, left to right. Everything is more or less governed by that. The dog bites the cat means one thing, and The cat bites the dog means the opposite. German is not so constrained. Der Hund beißt die Katze and Die Katze beißt der hund both mean the same thing: The dog bites the cat. Unlike Latin, the nominative and genitive cases are indicated in German by the form of the article. That’s why Die Katze beißt der hund can only mean The dog bites the cat, and not the other way around—in which case it would have to be Die Katze (subject) beißt den hund (object) if the cat were doing the biting. However, with Die Katze beißt der hund the word order implies a strong shift in emphasis, as if to imply with a degree of Teutonic impatience: Nein, Dummkopf: it’s the cat that the dog is biting, and not the parakeet. Somewhere along the line the English abandoned that kind of flexibility, and the rest of us are now living with the consequences. As a kind of word-order equivalent of Die Katze beißt der hund, we are obliged to take up those dreadfully blunt weapons of the passive voice and the gerund, and bludgeon our way towards something as hideous as The cat is being bitten by the dog, which, in any case, does not mean quite the same thing.

MALO MALO MALO MALO

This morning I received a card from Hamish in which he reminisces about Sponge Austin’s Latin classes at school, in particular the memorable proverb “Malo malo malo malo” which translates rather neatly into English as “I would rather be / In an apple tree (locative) / Than a naughty boy / In adversity,” further evidence (if it were needed) of the sparkling brilliance, economy, and homonymic brinkmanship of Classical Latin, and, incidentally, the resourcefulness of Myfanwy Piper in raiding a Latin grammar that apparently once belonged to her spinster aunt, and then splicing the text into Miles’s song for Benjamin Britten’s opera The Turn of the Screw (1954). The original designs for that year’s premiere at La Fenice were created by her husband the artist John Piper.

A flashy development of the original is “Malo malo malo malo malo malo malo, quam dente vento occurrere,” which means approximately “I would rather meet with a bad apple, with a bad tooth, than a bad mast with [i.e. in] a bad wind.”

I haven’t located Miss Playll’s Latin grammar, nor any evidence of ancient provenance—nice try, Wikipedia, but it is certainly not from Cicero—so “Malo malo malo malo” and “Malo malo malo malo malo malo malo, etc.” may well have been the inventions of some schoolroom wag, or an undergraduate with time on his hands.

Robert Reid remembered “Malo malo malo malo” having being used as an exercise at Glasgow Grammar School (Old Glasgow and Its Environs: Historical and Topographical, Glasgow: D. Robertson, 1864, p. 284, actually an addendum reprinted from one of his articles in the Glasgow Herald), and it was certainly also known to Alfred Henderson (Latin Proverbs and Quotations, London: Sampson Low, Son, and Marston, 1869) as well as to the Hon. Hugh Rowley (Gamosagammon; or, Hints on Hymen, for the Use of Parties About to Connubialize, London: John Camden Hotten, 1870).

Incidentally, I am rather tickled by the especially turgid German rendering of “Malo malo malo malo,” namely “Ich möchte lieber in einem Apfelbaum sein als ein schlechter Mann im Unglück,” which proves that strict case structure of a language does not necessarily guarantee anything remotely like concision.

Anyhow, the news from South Gippsland is encouraging: Mungo’s broken arm is mending well and apparently does not interfere with “his saxomaphone practice.” Roy played in the Inverloch/Kongwak school soccer side last Friday week in the lightning premierships (“against glamour teams from Foster, Kurrumburra, Leongatha, and Mirboo North,” but evidently not from Poowong East or Fish Creek). He even won a thrilling penalty shootout “Grand Final.”

I already knew about Mungo’s arm. He informed me about his excellent progress in a meticulously ciphered message that came by email last week. Poozles, meanwhile, seems destined to emulate his father’s fine record of sustained accomplishment on the school playing fields of Victoria.

postera crescam laude II

Somewhat satisfactorily, the problem of “postera crescam laude” was already knotty in the second or third century, when in his Commentum in Horatium, the North African grammarian and editor Pomponius Porphyrio tagged it with the explanatory remark: “Eleganter, quia semper sunt, quibus haec elocutio noua sit et laudetur.” Thanks to a timely intervention by my Yale colleagues Tristan Taylor and John Dillon, this gloss may now be translated as “Elegantly [put], because there are always those [people] to whom this statement is new, and by whom it is praised,” which doubles as a perfect rationale for whoever it was at the fledgling University of Melbourne who in 1854 came up with the bright idea of adopting the motto “postera crescam laude” in the first place. I hope it was Judge Redmond Barry, veteran horse-whipper and sometime defense counsel for my great-great grandfather William Pearson (who, notwithstanding his conviction for assaulting his catholic neighbor Mr. Desailly, following a steeplechase at Green Wattle Hill in which both men rode fiercely, went on to become a member for Gippsland in both houses of the Victorian Parliament). In any case, John goes on to say that the best literal translation of postera crescam laude (taking into account the recens which follows laude) would appear to be: “I will continue to grow in fame hereafter, ever new.” For his help with this, and for much else besides, I am most grateful.

postera crescam laude

In his excellent and thought-provoking address about humanities and philanthropy (Australian Book Review, June), Professor Malcolm Gillies directs our attention to the concluding poem (Carmen xxx) in Book III of the Odes of Horace in the verse translation by John Conington, specifically to the phrase “…usque ego postera / Crescam laude recens…,” of which the fragment “postera crescam laude” has since 1854 served as the motto of my alma mater, the University of Melbourne.

At the risk of dragging you kicking and screaming into this regularly recurring in-house discussion, that Latin phrase is especially difficult to translate, and all of the following have from time to time been proposed: (1) “I shall live in freshness of fame as long as the world endures”; (2) “I shall grow into the future, still / In fame renewed”; (3) “later / I shall grow by praise”; (4) “Ever new / My after fame shall grow”; (5) “In time to come / my fame will grow ever fresh”; (6) “On and on / shall I grow, ever fresh with glory of after time”; (7) “I shall increase with the praise of after ages”; (8) “I shall grow in the esteem of future generations”, and (9) “I shall rise in posterity’s praise.” Nowadays the university seems to have settled upon the very loose (10) “We shall grow in the esteem of future generations.”

No doubt the general, broad meaning is by now pretty clear, but the issue serves to demonstrate the brilliant economy of classical Latin, and the clunkiness of modern English in finding a satisfactory, attractive, or even true rendering of Horace’s phrase.

Context helps. In his recent commentary (2000), David West points to the remarkable strength of the poet’s voice—no false modesty there, though one might now disagree with the nineteenth-century glossist who found ‘no extravagance but much dignity’ in its tone.

At any rate, beginning with the first word of the poem, “Exegi” (I have built), the first person dominates the verb forms, pronouns, and general thrust, so crescam here (much bolstered by that ego, and the adverbs usque, i.e. continually, perpetually, and recens, i.e. newly or freshly) therefore needs to follow suit. In other words, we shall not grow or increase, nor my fame, nor anything else of mine; rather, I (the poet) shall grow…

For Horace this is simply a statement of fact, indeed one that has across the intervening twenty centuries proven remarkably prescient, but as the motto of a university it more properly functions as an expression of hope, or an aspiration. There are, after all, no guarantees.

Postera, meanwhile, comes from the adjective posterus, –a, –um, and means coming or occurring hereafter, following, ensuing, subsequent, future, or simply later on; laude is from the noun laus, –dis (praise, commendation, renown, relating to the verb laudo, –are, –aui, –atum, I praise, etc.). These go together, and therefore mean [in] the praise, approval, honour, or commendation of what used to be called “my posterity,” in other words those who come along after me: future generations, if you like.

The problem here is how to convey all of the separate but clear, indeed harmonious components of those six Latin words, or, worse, only three of them. In English we have to mess around with “ever new,” “ever fresh,” “on and on,” “in time to come,” all of which mean rather different things from each other, and only partly or imperfectly capture certain elements of the original.

On the other hand, if you are not careful you may end up with something as grotesque as “continually and, at the same time, being ever renewed and freshened up, I shall grow in the sense of rise and/or steadily increase or even expand in the estimation of those who come after me, forever”—which in any case doesn’t rhyme.

It is of little comfort to find that the Germans, Dutch, Spaniards and French have had an even harder time with postera crescam laude than we have.

In 1861, for example, Prof. Dr. Wilhelm Binder came up with “…herrlich bei Enkeln einst / Wächst mein Rame” (from herrlich = glorious, magnificent, even lovely; bei Enkeln = among descendants; einst = some day (implying “with luck,” a nice touch); wachsen = to grow, lengthen, broaden, and/or shoot up, so Wächst mein Rame = my fame shall grow). The Dutch were wordier but equally sensible: “Mijn lof zal hier na altijt even frisch aengroeien” (my fame shall...grow fresh—a nod to the abundance of sea air, perhaps).

Yet these are both as stodgy as the Spanish is impressionistic: “renovado siempre / Crescer con las alabanzas venideras” (always or ever renewed / to grow with the praises of those who come after), while the French is wholly flamboyant: “sans cesse, moi, par la gloire de la postérité, je grandirai toujours jeune” (without cease, I, by the glory of posterity, shall grow tall [or, intriguingly, lengthen (!), and remain] forever young)—but let us assume that the cheeky hint towards length and that conspicuous toujours jeune (forever young) are purely Gallic flourishes.

Which merely reinforces Malcolm’s point that it is well nigh impossible to put a price tag on all of that, so let us be gay.